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Coming Soon: Regents Walk
Adapted from the About page on the official website. Coming Soon: Regents Walk, typically shortened to Regents Walk or just Regents, is a comic and short story series developed by Ian Dean and M. Dean, a brother and sister team who have worked together on comics since 2007. The comic portion of the series is told in 12 chapters, beginning in 1987 and ending in 2000. It follows 12 kids as they grow up over 12 years of school, small town life, and their own unique struggles. Each chapter takes place in its own month and each story is a vignette in the much larger, and familiar, journey into adulthood. While each story is simple, the world in which they occur is complex and intricate, filled with years-long arcs, a web of relationships, and local legends. The series takes place, for the most part, in a small fictional Oregon town called Widow’s Perch, in Willamette Valley. With a population of around 15,000 and hundreds of named characters, we will be seeing a sizable margin of its inhabitants, and whether they are children or adults, they all grow and change. Some move away while others move in. Families break apart and reform. Friendships end as others are created. Widow’s Perch is a dynamic, very alive town; even if it is past its prime. While the 80’s and 90’s experience their retro resurgences and those decades’ children begin to take commanding positions on the world stage, Regents Walk also gleefully takes a look back at the times in which those adults were younger, working in popular media and the culture of those times into the story-telling. Widow’s Perch is a microcosm of America during those years, existing as a sheltered place that remains connected to the bigger world and has a variety of people and backgrounds. But the comic is not meant only for the millennial set, as its central themes of growing up among others who will have memories of a shared childhood’s events, movies, shows, music, toys, games, and celebrities remain universal. These were the times of the early internet, the golden age of Nickelodeon, Nintendo vs. Sega wars, and the original films, made before their remakes! The Short Story segments are written by Ian Dean, with special montage comic pages illustrated by M. Dean, the Short Stories are narratives like their comic counterparts. They follow the other 12 kids that are in the first chapter’s first grade class, known as the “Shadows” (it only sounds ominous). These tales are a little shorter and simpler overall, but expand on the world in their own ways, and use the medium of classic text-based storytelling to provide a different take at how these characters perceive their small town’s place and events. The stories go by the same rules as the comic; 12 years, 12 months. They take place before or after each comic chapter, and prelude or conclude various plot lines. Posted respectively, before or after a comic chapter, these stories contribute quite a bit to the central arcs and Widow’s Perch background. Characters in the main comic may mention and be affected by events from the stories, and vice versa. Updates are done on batches, usually on Tuesdays, at the official website and on Tapastic. Social sites include a Twitter feed and a Tumblr page.